This guide covers the administration features of CKAN 2.0, such as managing
users and datasets. These features are available via the web user interface to
a user with sysadmin rights. The guide assumes familiarity with the
User guide.

Certain administration tasks are not available through the web UI but need
access to the server where CKAN is installed. These include the range of
configuration options using the site’s “config” file, documented in
Configuration Options, and those available via
Command Line Interface.

Warning

A sysadmin user can access and edit any organizations, view and change user
details, and permanently delete datasets. You should carefully consider who has
access to a sysadmin account on your CKAN system.

Normally, a sysadmin account is created as part of the process of setting up
CKAN. If one does not already exist, you will need to create a sysadmin user,
or give sysadmin rights to an existing user. To do this requires access to the
server; see Creating a sysadmin user for details. If another organization is hosting
CKAN, you will need to ask them to create a sysadmin user.

Adding more sysadmin accounts is done in the same way. It cannot be done via
the web UI.

Some simple customizations to customize the ‘look and feel’ of your CKAN site
are available via the UI, at http://<my-ckan-url>/ckan-admin/config/.

Here you can edit the following:

Site title

This title is used in the HTML <title> of pages served by CKAN (which may
be displayed on your browser’s title bar). For example if your site title is
“CKAN Demo”, the home page is called “Welcome - CKAN Demo”. The site title is
also used in a few other places, e.g. in the alt-text of the main site logo.

Style

Choose one of five colour schemes for the default theme.

Site tag line

This is not used in CKAN’s current default themes, but may be used in
future.

Site tag logo

A URL for the site logo, used at the head of every page of CKAN.

About

Text that appears on the “about” page, http://<my-ckan-url>/about. You
can use Markdown here. If it is left empty, a standard text describing CKAN
will appear.

Intro text

This text appears prominently on the home page of your site.

Custom CSS

For simple style changes, you can add CSS code here which will be added to
the <head> of every page.

A sysadmin user has full access to user accounts, organizations and datasets.
For example, you have access to every organization as if you were a member of
that organization. Thus most management operations are done in exactly the same
way as in the normal web interface.

For example, to add or delete users to an organization, change a user’s role in
the organization, delete the organization or edit its description, etc, visit
the organization’s home page. You will see the ‘Admin’ button as if you were a
member of the organization. You can use this to perform all organization admin
functions. For details, see the User guide.

Similarly, to edit, update or delete a dataset, go to the dataset page and use
the ‘Edit’ button. As an admin user you can see all datasets including those
that are private to an organization. They will show up when doing a dataset
search.

A dataset which has been deleted is not permanently removed from CKAN; it is
simply marked as ‘deleted’ and will no longer show up in search, etc. The
dataset’s URL cannot be re-used for a new dataset.

To permanently delete (“purge”) a dataset:

Navigate to the dataset’s “Edit” page, and delete it.

Visit http://<my-ckan-url>/ckan-admin/trash/.

This page shows all deleted datasets and allows you to delete them permanently.

Warning

This operation cannot be reversed!

Note

At present, it is not possible to purge organizations or groups using the
web UI. This can only be done with access to the server, by directly deleting
them from CKAN’s database.

To find a user’s profile, go to http://<my-ckan-url>/user/. You can search
for users in the search box provided.

You can search by any part of the user profile, including their e-mail address.
This is useful if, for example, a user has forgotten their user ID. For
non-sysadmin users, the search on this page will only match public parts of the
profile, so they cannot search by e-mail address.

On their user profile, you will see a “Manage” button. CKAN displays the user
settings page. You can delete the user or change any of its settings, including
their username, name and password.

New in version 2.2: Previous versions of CKAN didn’t allow you to delete users through the
web interface.